Immensely popular children’s entertainer Ms. Rachel is among the latest high-profile figures to join protests outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in New Jersey, where reports of a hunger strike and inhumane conditions sparked ongoing protests and oversight visits from members of Congress.
“Met the sweetest children whose hearts are broken,” the YouTube star wrote on Instagram. “They just want their parents home again.”
Ms. Rachel, whose real name is Rachel Accurso, joined members of the New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice to sing songs with children outside the jail, which is facing widespread calls to shut down and free detainees inside.
She met with a 13-year-old girl whose father, a truck driver who has lived in the U.S. for 20 years, missed her birthday while locked up inside Delaney Hall, Accurso wrote.
“It makes no sense that their family has been ripped apart,” she wrote on Instagram. “Why are we traumatizing kids? Her brother has a disability and is nonverbal and cannot walk. They need their dad. I sang to her brother and he did the sign for ‘more’ many times. I will always stand with these families.”
In another post, she asked: “How is ripping this family apart and taking him from his children, one with severe special needs, OK?”
“I spoke with many traumatized kids who are scared to sleep at night,” she added. “Why are we terrorizing children?”
Detainees and members of Congress have alleged including rotting food, due process violations, a lack of access to legal counsel and retaliation from ICE agents for their ongoing strike actions at the facility.
“I can’t say enough wonderful things about the children and families whose loved ones are inside,” Accurso wrote. “I can’t say enough about how this cruelty is harming and traumatizing precious children who should get to just be kids. I know if you came and played cars and drew with chalk with them and laughed and sang and saw their tears you wouldn’t want what is happening to happen.”
Hundreds of people flooded her posts with comments praising her for her work, while others accused her of staging a “photo op.”
Roughly 300 people launched a hunger and labor strike on May 22 to protest conditions at Delaney Hall.
“We feel vulnerable and, in a way, kidnapped — detained without justification — not to mention that we are being tortured physically and psychologically due to the poor food resources provided in these detention centers,” detainees wrote in a letter shared by attorneys last month.
They signed the letter “S.O.S.”
Family separations echo an infamous “zero tolerance” era during Donald Trump’s first term that separated thousands of migrant children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border, a policy that was effectively blocked by a settlement in a federal court case.
But his second administration has launched an unprecedented expansion of family separation that targets mixed-status families in the country’s interior — including people who have lived in the U.S. for years — and instilling deep generational trauma, advocates have warned.
Administration officials have repeatedly denied allegations of abuse and inhumane conditions at Delaney Hall.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin dismissed reports of a hunger strike as detainees complaining about a lack of access to “ethnic food.”
“Well, they can go back to their country and get whatever food they want,” he said during a White House cabinet meeting. “We’re giving them the calories they want. This isn’t Holiday Inn.”
Tensions outside the facility have boiled over into violence in recent days, with ICE agents in military gear and heavily armored police trucks and New Jersey State Police officers beating back protesters who have remained outside the jail for days.
Accurso has increasingly used her platform to draw attention to vulnerable children around the world, including children in Gaza, campaign that has drawn wider attention to conditions in war-torn nations while facing backlash from critics over her advocacy.
She has also publicly lobbied for the release of immigrant families from the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, where hundreds of immigrants and their children have been locked up in a sprawling series of trailers in rural Texas.
She first became aware of the detention center after federal agents arrested the father of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos during the administration’s blitz in Minneapolis. The family was later released, but a defining image of preschooler wearing a bunny cap and Spider-Man backpack galvanized international attention to the scope of the president’s mass deportation efforts.
Earlier this year, Accurso spoke with a 9-year-old boy who was sent to Dilley after his asylum-seeking family was detained during a check-in appointment with immigration authorities.
“It was devastating,” she wrote about her call. “Let his family back into their community. This is cruelty.”
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